The Woman Near Kenmore Square

Yesterday, I published a post on the meaning of the Boston Marathon. I explained why I care about the race and noted that, when we find the perpetrator, we may find “someone who saw a reflection of the human spirit and decided just to try to shatter it.”

Above my post, we published a photograph, taken by Alex Trautwig of Getty, of “a woman near Kenmore Square.” Today, that woman sent me an e-mail, and then she told me the story of her day. Like that of so many runners, it’s both ordinary and extraordinary.

Her name is Emily Locher, and she’s thirty-seven years old. She lives in Weston, Connecticut, with her husband, where she works as a lawyer at an asset-management company. She ran her first marathon in 1998, and she first met the qualifying standards for Boston in 2004. Her personal best is 3:36.

Yesterday, though, she wasn’t really thinking about time. “I was diagnosed with breast cancer about eighteen months ago,” she told me. “Toeing the line was the big deal for me.” She had had an elective double mastectomy and extensive chemotherapy. But she had tried to train throughout. Every day she went in for treatment, she made sure to run. Maybe it was just a mile or two, and maybe it was slow. But it meant something to do something. Look closely at the photograph and you can see that her hair is, just barely, long enough to put into a ponytail. She had lost almost all of it during the chemo, and then she’d shaved the rest so that she could start fresh. Her parents haven’t seen her in a couple of months, and at first they weren’t sure it was her in the picture. “It was a personal triumph just to put my hair back.”

Locher isn’t as fast as she used to be: age and illness have played a role. She was hoping to run somewhere between four and four and a half hours, and she was on pace. She had started to slow, and maybe even walk a bit as she got downtown. But she was definitely going to finish. And then, suddenly, near the very end, she was told to stop. She hadn’t heard the explosions, and she didn’t know what was going on. At first, she and everyone else thought a runner had been injured. But then she started to hear from people on the sidelines what had happened. “It became really clear, within two minutes.”

She and the other runners waited in a crowd, with more runners filing in, like cars slowing to a halt on a highway where there’s been a crash. They walked to keep their quads from tightening. Then, she said, the most beautiful thing happened. “People on the sidelines just started handing us their telephones, telling us to call our families and then to hand it to the next person. ‘Take this. Call whoever.’ ” Locher sent a text to her husband saying she was O.K., and then asking him to alert the rest of her family. On September 11th, he had been living a block and a half from the World Trade Center, and her mind flashed back to the comfort she felt when he had called.

Soon, she turned around and started to walk backwards, looking for a friend with whom she had started the race. Maybe the friend was a few minutes behind—or maybe ahead. Locher was scared. That’s when the picture was snapped. You can see her moving in the opposite direction from runners who don’t yet know the race has ended. She put her sunglasses up to better scan the crowd. She was starting to get cold, which, she says, may be why her hands were at her face. “I was nervous and hopeful.”

Locher found her friend and eventually was told to leave Commonwealth Avenue and return to her hotel. “Everyone was totally calm. The policemen and the firemen could not have been better. They were measured and so efficient.” She hadn’t known the full extent of the horror until she returned to her hotel room and turned on the television. But she was safe, as was her friend. She called me today from the Amtrak, heading south to Connecticut.

Her shoes are purple because it’s her favorite color. They’re special to her, and she wanted to wear them in this race—this moment of celebration that marked her return from being sick.

Photograph, of Emily Locher, by Alex Trautwig/Getty.

Nicholas Thompson is the editor of newyorker.com where he oversees and manages the magazine’s Web site.